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“You barely touched this.”
Her gaze snapped to the bottle as I raised it, and she looked confused. Her eyebrows came together before she held her hands up, both of them, and gasped. “I didn’t even feel you take that.”
Shewasdrunk.
She raised her gaze back to me, her hands still up in the air. “I parked at Manny’s, grabbed a bottle, and just started walking. I wasn’t paying attention. Dancing, drinking.” Her voice dropped low again. “I’ve never drunk before.”
Whoa.
My head went back an inch. “Never?”
Her eyes still wide, she shook her head at the same time. “Never. I accidentally went to a party once because my boyfriend was the local Uber. He went to pick someone up and I had to go to the bathroom. He thought I went in to stay and join the party.”
I… I had no words. I was quite aware that most of my life, if there was a night I didn’t party,thatwas the oddity.
“Oh my God. You’re looking at me like I’m a freak.” Her face flooded with color, and she closed her eyes. She was still holding her hands up.
“Okay.” I didn’t know what was going on here, but I moved in, took both her hands, and lowered them for her. She opened her eyes, and there was no reaction that she knew I did that. “Have you eaten today?”
She shook her head.
“You want to eat?”
“Um.” She started chewing on her bottom lip, her eyebrows still pulled together. Then she stopped. Her face cleared. She blinked. “No. I need to keep drinking.” She grabbed my beer and took a long draw. I was waiting for the sputtering, thinking she didn’t realize she reached for the wrong bottle, but nothing came. She kept drinking.
I got fixated on how her throat was working, chugging that down.
She was taking long and slow pulls, and she kept going.
It clicked she just chugged a third of my beer and I had a thirty-two ouncer with me today before I grabbed it back. “Stop.”
She reached for it, stepping with my arm.
I moved, turning and using my body to check her. “No.”
“But—”
I raised the beer so she could see it clearly. “That wasn’t yours.”
Her mouth opened. She was going to argue, but she stopped. A gasping sound came next before she slumped, her forehead falling to my arm. It was raised right in front of her. She moaned. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry. I’m a mess.”
If two shots of vodka already had her wasted, that beer was going to finish her off.
I glanced back to the country club, but she’d be a mess there. I didn’t think Ava would want people seeing her like this.
Taking her arm, I began to walk to the parking lot.
“Wha—where are we going?”
“You need some food.”
She started to put on the brakes.
Nope. I wasn’t having this.
And I wasn’t questioning myself why I was doing any of this as I let her go, put both caps on the alcohol, and stuffed them into my pockets. I had large pockets. Then I turned, bent down, and picked her up. She was slung over my shoulders.
“Wha— Zeke! Put me down!”
